Dear Ms. Foran: “The End of a Political Revolution” was an unfortunate and uncharacteristically poor title for an Atlantic article, particularly one which otherwise was quite correct. Even Senator Sanders knew, and said as much repeatedly, that his election would not be “the revolution” he has been urging, and which he’ll likely continue to argue and work for. Thus his losing the nomination augers nothing about “the revolution.” Whether the revolution has ended is yet to be seen—and will be determined not by Sanders, but by the preponderance of Millennials who responded to him.

By contrast, President Obama’s first election heralded the end, not the beginning, of the revolution many anticipated with his victory. This was because Obama unwisely demobilized his troops—his active supporters—as soon as he was elected, as if he had won a victory rather than just a battle.

Sanders recognized and articulated Obama’s unforced error. And Sanders troops do not have to disband, just because Sanders lost. I suspect they can even continue be funded by the same Sanders supporters who donated to his campaign.

“The revolution” was always about what happened in the Congress and in state and local governments. So we have yet to see if it’s alive or dead.

Bernie Sanders certainly made clear that the political revolution was never solely about him—or any single candidate. And yet, when Sanders declared that Clinton had won the Democratic nominating process, a certain vision of how the revolution might have played out effectively died.

By running for president on a platform of political revolution, Sanders was, whether explicit or not, suggesting that he could help to lead that revolution, or at the very least work to make it a reality by serving as president. Now, the revolution that might have been if Sanders had won the White House won’t come to pass.

As our reader notes, that doesn’t mean there won’t still be revolution. At its heart, the political revolution that Sanders promoted aspires to wrest power away from wealthy elites and restore it to ordinary Americans. Whether that can be achieved may very well hinge on what supporters of the campaign do next, and if they succeed in organizing to elect populist progressive candidates across the country.

Efforts to ensure that the revolution won’t fade away have already started to unfold. Bernie has endorsed a crop of candidates running for Congress and state legislature seats. He has promised to shortly announce “the creation of successor organizations to carry on the struggle.” Sanders supporters are also actively working to carry on the revolution. Brand New Congress is one example.

Still, all this points to a central tension of the Sanders campaign. Sure, Bernie said it wasn’t about him. But for so many of his loyal followers, he has been the source of inspiration for political engagement. Sanders is poised to continue agitating for a revolution. But it remains to be seen how much the so-called revolution’s energy and enthusiasm can be sustained once the campaign has reached an end.

I would like to comment briefly on Prof. Bauer’s trashing of caucuses only because it seems to be a repeated line of attack from certain quarters for being undemocratic. Yes, it is regrettable that caucuses demand more from their participants and this hurts people who have to work for a living. However, caucuses also hew closer to the Tocquevillian ideal of American democracy as being a deliberative exchange of ideas. They attract more passionate participants, but these also tend to be more committed and informed participants.

Primaries, in contrast, disproportionately favor candidates with name recognition, tilting the scales in favor of established players, celebrity politicians, people with deep enough pockets to run expansive advertising campaigns, and the favor and patronage of machine-style political bosses. The larger the state, the more true this becomes and the more pronounced this advantage gets.

If a Berner wanted to be as sour about formats that disfavor their candidate, they could as easily write-off primary participants as low-information sheep, manipulated by party bosses and savvy marketing the way Prof. Bauer writes off caucus-goers as ignorant fanatics.

The truth is, any nominating process involves numerous trade-offs on things like convenience, representation of people, and representation of ideas. Neither caucuses nor primaries are inherently better or worse than each other; they just negotiate these trade-offs differently.

The hybrid system we have makes an attempt at balancing the goods and bads of both contests. Arguably the outcomes are not only far more just and representative than the brute majoritarianism being argued for by Prof. Bauer, but more conducive to fostering a vigorous debate and exchange of ideas. This may frustrate those for whom the chief priority is the elevation of their chosen candidate by any means necessary, but it is certainly better for the country to have these debates, even if things become acrimonious and feelings get hurt.

Update from a dissenting reader:

Pavan’s comments on primaries and caucuses first assume we agree with his idea about what our ideal model of democracy is. But then, I have to ask: Has he been to a caucus? To call them a “deliberative exchange of ideas” by “informed participants” is malarkey.

Caucuses, like primaries, suffer from what we might call less-that-ideal forms of persuasion. Admittedly, primaries rely on some of the factors he mentions, but at least the voting is done by secret ballot. When you are actually in the voting booth, there’s no group chanting at you, no peer pressure, and no need for social skills or worries about social anxieties. Even if caucuses were some calm deliberative body, the fact that they only happen at one fixed time makes it difficult for people to attend even if they want to.

A better defense of caucuses is that they reward campaign organization skills, which is an important aspect of campaigning. Getting people together to use those tools of social suasion to get results is necessary in a campaign, but it’s far from some ideal.

Pavan replies:

I have to admit, I’m a little envious of my detractor if I can say “exchange of ideas” and their mental image is one of calm discussion rather than peer pressure and raucous people yelling at you. I would like to spend Thanksgiving with their family; it seems pleasant.

Here’s a new reader with two cents:

I would buy the argument that the deliberative style of a caucus have real advantages if I thought that caucuses were actually deliberative. But let’s be honest here. Most folks do not go into a caucus carefully listening to reasoned arguments from surrogates, and then decide who to vote for. They go to a caucus knowing who they are going to vote for, and then do it.

The point that caucuses have the most informed voters is a true one, but it actually undermines their point. The most informed voters are the ones least likely to change their minds, and are the ones who are going to be most dedicated to their particular candidate. Thus the main difference between a primary and a caucus is the length of time it takes to vote.

Monica Bauer is our pro-Clinton reader and retired poli-sci professor who argued at length that many Sanders supporters are suffering from “campaign psychosis” by not acknowledging that he doesn’t have a chance of becoming the nominee based on the delegate rules. In that same note, reader Robert Henry Eller rebutted Monica at length. Here’s a quick retort from Andy, a reader in Canada:

Monica Bauer calls Sanders a “fringe candidate”? On Tuesday, 1.4 million Californians voted for Clinton and one million for Sanders. Sanders is her definition of a fringe candidate?

The overall tally is about 16 million and 12.3 million—in Clinton’s favor, of course. In a followup note, Monica responds to Robert:

Mr. Eller argues his case largely by accusing me of not being specific, but there are many, many examples of campaign psychosis that are evident in the factual record of the Sanders campaign.

Campaign psychosis is the willful ignoring of facts in favor of engaging in wishful thinking. Therefore, it is simple to test whether or not both campaigns have engaged in this. Here it is: How has the Sanders campaign explained its losses? The system must be rigged, the Establishment is against us, the Southern primaries reflect the votes of more conservative Democrats, and on and on.

All of these excuses have been debunked to the satisfaction of all but the most enthusiastic conspiracy theorists. Please show me the facts of all the excuses the Clinton campaign has used when she has lost. Let’s see the whiny protests. Let’s see the abandonment of facts for wishful thinking on the part of the Clinton campaign.

Mr. Eller falls into the fallacy that the media often demonstrate, that “both sides” must somehow equally be at fault in every instance. No, there does not seem to be a trail of facts where the Clinton campaign ignores the math, makes promises of magical victories to come based on nothing stronger than the Clintonesque version of “feeling the Bern,” etc.

I remember well the 2008 Democratic primaries, and how Clinton held on to the bitter end similar to Sanders this year (though the latter is decidedly more behind in delegates and the popular vote than Clinton was to Obama). Obama became the presumptive nominee on June 3—when the last two states voted—and Clinton conceded on June 7, so by that standard Sanders should concede within two days or he’ll be clinging on even more than she did.

I dug up a May 28 Atlantic post from Marc Ambinder that featured “Clinton’s Closing Argument To Superdelegates,” since superdelegates by that point could have swung the nomination to Clinton despite Obama’s lead in pledged delegates. (Sanders is making a similar plea now, as Conor just covered.) Here’s Marc:

In a final plea to undeclared Democratic superdelegates, Sen. Hillary Clinton points to her lead in the popular vote, some recent polling showing her strength against John McCain, and surveys showing that voters believe she is ready to serve as commander in chief. In a letter, sent Tuesday, and in an extensive memo, sent today, Clinton frames the choice for superdelegates as one between a candidate who has won more delegates in caucuses [Obama] and a candidate who has won more delegates in primaries and has won the popular vote [Clinton].

But as FactCheck.org concludes, “Only by counting Michigan, where Clinton’s name was on the ballot but Obama’s was not, can Clinton claim to have won more votes.” Michigan had broken the DNC rules, stripping the state of delegates, so both candidates pledged not to campaign there; the same went for Florida. Yet:

[V]oter turnout in both states was relatively low when compared with record-high turnout in other states. Nevertheless, Clinton claimed wins in Florida and Michigan, and she flew to Fort Lauderdale on the night of the Florida election to thank supporters for what she called a “tremendous victory.”

So it seems Clinton had a bit of “campaign psychosis” of her own in 2008, when she was the one behind. Back to Monica:

The Clinton campaign has been reliant on thinking and reasoning, not “feeling.” So her opponents imagine that it is somehow a bad thing to be all about facts and issues, as opposed to the romance of feelings and “revolution.” But that is an argument for another essay.

I do not find small donors or a reliance on small donors to be “criminal” as Mr. Eller asserts; I merely point out the facts that when candidates rely on rational actors for funding (and that’s a political science term of art; it does not paint others as “irrational” in any normal sense of the word), candidates who are losing are forced to drop out. That is why Marco Rubio and John Kasich left the Republican race.

And yes, rational actors are self-interested, but that hardly makes them villains. Democracy is supposed to function when people organize to promote a mutual self-interest, which applies to labor unions and Planned Parenthood as much as it does to “the 1%.” And note that Sanders has received the endorsement of only a couple of labor unions, as opposed to the many unions supporting Clinton, not to mention the other groups dependant on millions of grass roots donors such as the LGBT rights group The Human Rights Campaign Fund, NARAL, and many more who are not supporting Bernie. These groups are acting rationally to support the candidate most likely to be successful against Donald Trump, and a self-identified life-long Socialist is not that candidate, no matter how robust his support seems in a poll taken before the majority of voters are tuning in to the race.

Because, no matter that Eller reminds us that “Sanders has hardly hidden his Socialism,” the media has rarely even whispered it. And decades of public opinion research show that if voters are made to understand that a candidate is a self-identified Socialist, the support for that candidate goes down to single digits. Rational actors such as Planned Parenthood, and perhaps also the African American community, understand this in ways the Bernistas do not.

Small donors are a good thing, but when they become swept up in campaign psychosis, believing every small drop of good news is the moment the campaign will convince hundreds of superdelegates to switch sides, then those donors are not responding to facts or probabilities. They have been swept away by enthusiasm. They are politically in love with a candidate. And we all know that love can make us blind to the faults of our beloved.

As to the Sanders campaign exaggerating the chances of the coming “revolution” by pointing to victories in low-turnout caucuses … here again, the facts are on my side. Eller asserts: “Dr. Bauer’s sour grapes perspective on low-turnout caucuses (empowered by the Democratic Party, of course) and their ‘fanatical’ attendees, fails to address the obvious question: If the turnout required to win is so low, what wasn’t the formidable Clinton campaign unable to overcome such low numbers of ‘fanatics?’”

This is incredibly easy to refute. Anybody who’s ever taken Intro to American Government should know that caucuses are the least democratic method of making political choices, for the very reason that they are biased against the working class! Because caucuses require attendees to give up four or five hours of their time as the price of participation, working mothers, tired minimum-wage workers, and other members of Sanders’s beloved “working class” are far less likely to show up than the small percentage of voters who are fanatically attached to a candidate. Mere supporters stay home, activists show up. This has been proven so many times it is a political science axiom.

And this year was no exception. Sanders biggest percentage win on June 7th came in North Dakota, where he had a whopping percentage of the vote in a caucus where fewer than 600 people participated! The irony of a campaign that’s supposed to be about empowering the masses, where the largest margins of victory have come in very low turn-out caucuses, is lost on those in the throes of campaign psychosis.

The irony of a campaign that at first lashed out against superdelegates as the perverted child of the Establishment meant to coronate Hillary, is now turning to superdelegates with an illogical pitch to turn against the will of the majority of voters, and the majority of pledged delegates, because Bernie is ahead in a few polls, well … that’s a heaping load of irony that is also lost on the Bernie-or- Busters. If that’s not the very definition of “campaign psychosis,” I don’t know what would be a better one.

If one needed further proof of that argument, one needs look no further than Sanders speech on June 7th. After saying for weeks that he would win California, and that would be a powerful argument to the superdelegates, you would not have known that he had lost California, and lost decisively, by listening to his speech, which exhorted his supporters to fight on, fight on, to the D.C. primary, where he knows he will lose by a huge margin.

Political science seeks to explain reality. To deal with facts. The Framers thought it was extremely important for democratic politics to remain reality based, because the minute it becomes all about emotions, voters can lose sight of what is possible, and not possible, in a large nation with many different points of view. Democracy requires compromise. Ideological purity requires putting an end to compromise.

The heart of Mr. Eller’s response is a defense of Sanders as the better candidate because he wants a revolution. That the real difference between the two campaigns is one favoring incremental positive change and the other sweeping, and most likely impossible-to-pass-through-Congress, revolutionary reforms.

Here Eller is absolutely correct! And that is the real reason the Sanders campaign has lost. Most voters are wary of “revolution.” They don’t know what the outcome would be of eliminating the Affordable Care Act in favor of a single-payer system, or how the country could possibly afford free college for all. There will be no “revolution” of the masses because the masses do not want it! They’ve been offered the choice between revolution and incremental, but real, progressive change. And they have spoken.

Here’s a closing note from a pro-Sanders reader, Lars:

I just read Monica Bauer’s piece. If this were a typical primary, then she would be absolutely right. After all, both the Republican party and the Democratic party are private institutions with no real need to actually ever listen to their voters concerns. These parties can do like they have always done: place a moderate, non-threatening stuffed shirt on stage for the primaries and present faux debates to see who presents their private institution’s talking points most charismatically.

The difference with this election compared to other elections has been the outright rejection of the practices of both parties by their bases. The job approval of Congress is what, something like 15%? [CB: Yep, that’s aboutright.] The Democrats had a dismal turnout in 2012 but didn’t learn from it and the Republicans have had a terrible time in federal elections since, well frankly, Reagan. [Well, except for that whole Republican Revolution.] The idea that scripted events with a bunch of talking heads repeating lines that is non-threatening to the money behind either party will appeal to voters in their current mood is ludicrous.

Sanders’s campaign has successfully done one very important thing: pointed out the hypocrisy of many of the core Democratic positions to about 43% of the Democratic voters.

Traditionally, liberals have stressed how important education is; stressed how education levels the playing field, how retraining is the best way to get people back on their feet and off of government assistance, how critical thinking lets us examine the world and political arguments and come to the best choices … and yet at the same time the cost of college and the levels educational debt has exploded, Congress has passed laws making debt hereditary (if you die with educational debt, your family and children must continue to pay). No where else in the world are the skills which are so valuable to training its citizenry to compete globally so outrageously and prohibitively growing out of reach for its citizenry.

For years, we’ve been told that 40 million people are without healthcare. Every year for election after election we threw this number at the Republicans and said “this is why healthcare is a failure in this country” and then Obamacare came along and we added six or seven million new people to the healthcare system and said fait accompli. A Sanders supporter would say that is barely better than the Republican system, and when you add the rising deductibles that people are paying, making it prohibitively expensive for a person on Obamacare to actually visit a doctor, all the while hospital fees, medicine costs are higher in this country than anywhere else in the world.

And then there is wealth inequality. We all were shocked at the blatant money laundering the rest of the world engages in when the Panama Papers were released, but nobody mentions that Joe Biden and Harry Reid are both long-time representatives of states with money laundering practices that make Panama look like amateur hour.

So I am all for Sanders staying in the race. Every vote for him is a vote that says no to a system that takes one or two tentative steps forward.

With Hillary Clinton now the clear presumptive nominee, should Sanders finally step aside and end his campaign, or should he continue forward into the convention in late July? This reader, Dan, “a Bernie supporter who also thinks Hillary could be a good president,” thinks Sanders should stay in the race:

Bernie certainly shouldn’t go negative on Hillary, BUT—here are two reasons for him to remain:

1) Bernie deserves influence on the VP pick and the platform. A Clinton/Warren ticket looks very different from Clinton/Tim Kaine, and a platform based on progressive principles (that Hillary herself has espoused at various times in her career) is very different from a neoliberal Bill Clinton platform.

2) He’s a viable backup if Hillary gets indicted (fairly or otherwise). Far better to drop Bernie in when he got 45% of the vote than, say, Joe Biden (who didn’t get a single vote). I’m sure the indictment would be highly politically motivated, but we don’t want to be fighting one during a campaign!

Reader David adds more generally, “The longer Bernie stays in the race, the more likely it is that his movement will endure and make a lasting impact on the Democrats.” That lasting impact could be at the state-legislature level, given Sanders’s fundraising focus there, as Clare recently reported.

Another Sanders supporter, Robert Henry Eller—the reader who rebutted a pro-Clinton reader yesterday evening—expands on the idea of Sanders staying in the race to shape the party platform:

I don’t think it is very likely that Sanders will get the nomination. Nonetheless, I think it is correct and important for him to stay in the race into the nominating convention. I am more committed to the platform than to the candidate, and I believe Sanders feels the same way. I want to see Sanders’ platform impact the Democratic platform as much as possible.

The Democrats will continue to hemorrhage legislative, executive, and judicial power and influence at both the federal and state levels if they continue on the DLC/Third Way/Republican-lite path they’ve been on since at least 1992. But more importantly, Sanders’ platform is what the U.S. needs to return to a healthy economic and political climate.

And this is a Capitalist talking. (I was even an Ayn Rand capitalist as a teenager. I am now 67. I am aware of no author more misunderstood and distorted by self-styled opponents and proponents as Rand.) I support Sanders precisely because I am a Capitalist, and because I am thoroughly convinced that his socialist democracy platform planks are essential to the health of a capitalist system. It is sadly ignored that socialist democracy is predicated on the private ownership of the means of production—as opposed to democratic socialism, which even Sanders himself incorrectly identifies and associates with. Let’s say his presidential campaign is nothing but an extension of his lifelong campaign for socialist democratic moderations of capitalism—moderations that strengthen, not weaken, capitalism.

Frankly, I don’t expect Clinton's email “scandal” to blow up, nor do I expect an FBI indictment. For me, her weaknesses have nothing to do with such matters, except as they reflect on her judgement, which I find congenitally weak. I expect Clinton to win the nomination. I expect Sanders to aggressively oppose Trump, and so implicitly or explicitly, Sanders will support Clinton.

What troubles me is that I consider Clinton a weak candidate in the general election. I will certainly be happy if she beats Trump, even if I don’t entirely rule out the admittedly risky “value” of a Trump Presidency to possibly force both parties to reform (I’m not a nihilist). I’m glad that so many believe Clinton’s latest foreign policy speech was effective against Trump. But I’ve seen all the “experts” have been wrong about virtually everything during this election cycle, so I will not count out a Trump victory.

Partly because of polls, I do believe Sanders might be a stronger opponent of Trump than would Clinton be. I also believe Sanders would be a harder target for Trump. I certainly hope Trump might still debate Sanders, to give us some real data to see if this is true.

I remember that Al Gore “lost” the debates against George W. Bush, because Gore essentially forfeited the debates, refusing to actually debate W., because Gore apparently thought it was beneath him to even waste his energy and intellect. Because everyone expected W. to lose the debates to Gore, when Gore did not eviscerate W., W. was seen as the “winner” (i.e., he didn’t lose). I wonder what happens to Clinton in real time in a debate against Trump. Sanders, I suspect, could and would be less defensive, and more offensive, against Trump.

So, although I don’t expect Sanders to be nominated under any circumstances I actually anticipate, I absolutely believe he should continue to contest the nomination, and contest the platform. I think he’s doing all Americans a great service. I hope he continues to do so. And I hope Clinton, if she wins, will be a better president than I expect her to be.

I’m a retired political science professor. I’ve also been a candidate who’s lost an election, and I understand there’s a natural tendency to fall into what I call “campaign psychosis,” where you only see what you want to see. Everybody understands the human desire to hold onto hope.

But here is what I’ve seen that is unique to this primary: The Sanders campaign would have been dead long ago under the old rules of presidential politics, if the only source of campaign cash were coming from rational actors (the dreaded “donor class”) who stop giving money once all signs point to failure. Bernie would have been gone in March.

If the Sanders campaign existed before social media, it would have had to spend money to communicate to supporters and would not have been able to count on the free services of millions of activists on Twitter and Facebook that are easily able to gather at a moment's notice. Gone by March.

It is the ease with which campaign cash can be generated and followers exhorted that has come only with a robust social media environment that has artificially kept a fringe candidate not only alive, but able to thrive by winning low turnout caucuses where a small number of fanatical followers can easily be translated into victory.

A second set of phenomena has been unique to the Clinton/Sanders race.

One candidate, Hillary Clinton, has had to pull almost all her punches. Bernie Sanders has skillfully used a kind of political blackmail: “Go negative on me,” says Bernie, “and I will take my supporters further away from the Democratic party, and they could ruin your chances in November.”

Bernie is not constrained by the typical forces that keep a wounded and angry former candidate from lashing out. Bernie doesn’t need a future in the Democratic Party, and he doesn’t give a shit about the Democratic Party. So there’s nothing to constrain him from acting, post-defeat, in ways destructive to the future of the party.

I can’t recall another presidential primary where the front-runner has basically caved to political blackmail, resulting in the hands-off treatment that Clinton has given Sanders. I think this is due to bad advice given to Clinton, which set up a vicious cycle: The Clinton campaign takes a pass on negative attacks, so naturally Sanders does not get much tough scrutiny by the press, and when this results in Sanders having temporarily higher positives and lower negatives in the polls, Sanders uses this to claim he, the self-described life-long Socialist without a single great legislative achievement to show for a life-long career in elected office, is more likely to win a general election!

If I were running an informational campaign on Sanders, no holds barred, I’m pretty sure I could get his negatives up higher than Trump’s with everyone who doesn’t wake up every morning pining for the legalization of weed. And I wouldn’t need dirty tricks or even distortion to do it, just a close look at the Sanders’s actual record, and what his idea of socialism would mean for raising taxes.

Any Bernie supporters want to present a final case for his continued fight in this contest? Drop us a note: hello@theatlantic.com. Update from a reader with a strong rebuttal, Robert Henry Eller:

Dr. Bauer facilely identifies “campaign psychosis” on the basis of one failed election, at what level we are not informed. Since this psychosis is so easy to fall into, Dr. Brauer fails to explain why Clinton and her staff have not similarly fallen in this same psychosis.

Dr. Bauer accuses Sanders of the crime of being funded by small donors. As she identifies the donor class as rational (I assume self serving) actors, she infers that small donors must be non-rational.

Dr. Bauer’s sour grapes perspective on low-turnout caucuses (empowered by the Democratic Party, of course) and their “fanatical” attendees, fails to address the obvious question: If the turnout required to win is so low, what wasn’t the formidable Clinton campaign unable to overcome such low numbers of “fanatics?” Is this not an example of the “If I lose, the results don’t count” attitude of ignoring reality that Clinton, her supporters, and Dr. Brauer accuse Sanders and his supporters of?

Dr. Bauer asserts Clinton “has had to pull almost all of her punches.” Really. Not a few people noted her, and her surrogates, doing quite the opposite. Dr. Brauer has not at least been following the campaign in The New York Times? Meanwhile, Sanders asserted in their first debate that he was tired of hearing about Clinton’s emails. Who indeed pulled punches?

When, where, and how did Sanders threaten to take his supporters further away from the party, as Dr. Brauer asserts in quotes? Sanders has always asserted his primary interest since the ascension of Trump was to defeat Trump. Sanders has always said that Clinton was a far better choice than any Republican candidate.

On the other hand, Sanders has, correctly, pointed out that he cannot simply tell his supporters who to vote for. Sanders knows that he had to ask for, to earn, his supporters votes. But somehow, Clinton is absolved from asking for and earning the votes of Sanders supporters. (Has Dr. Brauer forgotten the PUMAs of the 2008 cycle?) And if Clinton can’t gain the support of Sanders supporters, it will only be because Sanders tells his supporters not to support Clinton?

This leads to perhaps the most glaring omission of Dr. Brauer’s “analysis:” That there might be any difference between Clinton’s and Sanders’ platforms and philosophies. Is there not a big difference between incrementalism and a wholesale change of direction? Is not asking perhaps generations to wait or to acquiesce in their own well-being, or to ask voters if they might want something now for themselves? Whatever side, if any, you’re on in this actual debate—which Clinton has avoided as much as possible—these are not even close to the same platform.

The front-runner has “caved to political blackmail?” What is blackmail? The temerity of so many voters to support and voluntarily vote for Sanders? What a betrayal toward True Believers in Clinton! How annoying democracy is! Perhaps Clinton and the Democratic establishment is simply guilty of not taking much of their supposed constituency seriously?

The title “Is Bernie Going to Bring the Dems Down With Him?” is already presumptuous, arrogant and whiny. Sanders has never shown any interest in bringing the Democratic Party down. [CB: Those are two different things; Sanders undoubtedly doesn’t want Trump to win.] All he has been trying to do, consistently, for over half a century, is to bring the country up.

If there has been damage done to the Democratic Party, it has been self inflicted. What has Sanders done that has lost the Democrats hundreds of seats in the Congress, state legislatures, governors mansions, over the at least eight years? Clinton supporters pointing fingers at Sanders are even more pathetic than Trump supporters blaming Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, women, African-Americans, for their woes.

Why, finally, does Dr. Bauer assert she could get Sanders’ negatives up higher than Trump’s? I guess she hasn’t noticed that Sanders has never hidden his democratic socialism, nor his higher taxes (but not necessarily overall public plus private costs), which have already been vilified by Krugman and other Clinton surrogates. Yet Sanders is still the only candidate with net positive approval. Isn’t it amazing that a candidate “without a single great legislative achievement to show for a life-long career in elected office” (Clinton’s achievements, anyone?) has garnered such support? Maybe commitment, integrity, authenticity, platform, ideas, actually matter to voters.

Another reader, Dave M., adds to the counterargument:

I found it a little amusing when Monica Bauer accused Sanders of being an underdog candidate doing what underdog candidates have done forever, and how frontrunners have to treat them if they want a shot at that underdog’s supporters later (“One candidate, Hillary Clinton, has had to pull almost all her punches. Bernie Sanders has skillfully used a kind of political blackmail”). That’s just politics. I thought Sanders was way too easy on her, to be honest, and a sign that in the end, he would indeed be standing with the Democrats.

Also just politics: At this point, the winner by definition now ought to be gracious. Hillary could now tack right and go with the usual Democratic Party stance of “we know you may not like it but where else are you going to go?” Given the relative closeness of this primary as far as change vs. establishment candidates within the party go, it would be foolish for the Democratic Party not to flip the usual script and welcome these energized and engaged voters with open arms, throwing them a few (meaningful) bones, rather than alienating them further by pointing fingers.

Sanders’ contribution has been immense, and has opened a lot of eyes and minds in a way no major candidate has in a very long time. It would be short-sighted to think this progressive streak is going to fold up and disappear for good. It might need a while to regroup, but it will return, with more lessons learned and improved strategies going forward.

An aside, if Dr. Bauer can entertain hypotheticals like “If there were no social media...” then I also can’t help but wonder: If it were a bland, B-list moderate Democrat like John “Reporting for Duty” Kerry running against Sanders this time instead of a major political celebrity like Hillary Clinton, would we “irrational” small donors really have been so irrational? I think the Democratic Party leadership got lucky and dodged the proverbial bullet ... this time.

A great sports analogy from reader Brad regarding this late moment in the Democratic race:

I have no preference over who wins the nomination. My comments are about the nature of competition in the homestretch. I’m tired of hearing about poll numbers and how Bernie should drop out of the race because the delegate count is impossible, etc. In the political arena, things can change on a whim just like in sports, or life in general.

This is a hilarious football play that shows my point:

Say Beebe saw that Lett had such a lead and thought, “There’s no way I can catch him” and gave up. Lett would’ve scored and been celebrating a lot more than he already was. But instead, Beebe hustled and stripped Lett at the last second.

Imagine these scenarios: Say a hot mic picked up Hillary saying something crazy or a racial epitaph or something. That might be something that could sway voters on the fence. Or let’s go back to 2008. Imagine if Obama got caught saying something crazy, or dissing women or whatever. I think that might have swayed a lot of people to vote for Clinton. Although these are extreme examples and the former isn’t likely, my point is that you play the game to the end because you don’t know what could happen.

If I were Sanders and came all this way, I wouldn’t stop; anything can happen. Similarly, if I was Clinton, I wouldn’t say “I got a such a big lead, I’m going to stop. No, I’m playing the game to the final whistle.”

This next reader, John Mensing, contends that Bernie has already won the Democratic primary, based on expectations:

Well, Chris, the most salient point that’s been missing from most articles on the subject—including columns in The Atlantic like “This Is How Revolutions End”—is that Hillary lost. She came into the race as the presumptive nominee with every advantage: a brace of superPACs, munificent funding, media that had donated already generously to her campaign, name recognition, and the “thumb on the scale” chicanery of machine politics at the precinct level. She was supposed to either have enough pledged delegates by now to have the nomination secured (like Trump does) or be in sight of that total.

Instead, she lost. She failed to get enough delegates, and so, come June 7th [the day of California’s primary], she will not have the requisite total.

Clinton does look increasingly likely to lose California based on the latest polling, but John’s claim that she will not have the requisite number of delegates is dubious, according to a new NYT report: “She is expected to reach the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the nomination roughly three hours before the California results are tallied, when the polls close in New Jersey, a mathematical fact that Mrs. Clinton’s allies have been reciting to reporters.” Back to John:

So she, and her surrogates, are trying to spin this, saying that the superdelegates—whose job, after all, is to decide in just such a contest, where a presumptive nominee fails to get the requisite number, which is the best candidate—have already been bought. It’s all spin, spin, spin. And people recognize it, and are disgusted by it, and are disgusted with Hillary.

She’s a weak candidate. Sanders is a much more viable alternative. Getting people to like Hillary more is like getting people to like Nixon more.

Bernie’s David-vs-Goliath record against Hillary has been impressive indeed, but his success ironically undercuts his core message: That big money and corporate influence control the political process. But Bernie has demonstrated through his vast network of small donors and huge rallies that even a democratic socialist can bring the establishment to its knees (much like outsider Obama did to propel his first presidential bid, riding it to two terms and shaping the establishment from the inside). True, Bernie is still likely to lose the nomination, thus bolstering his One Percent theory, but he will get incredibly close regardless. And he and his supporters have nevertheless shaped the priorities of the Democratic establishment through their intense pressure.

However, on the other side of the race, Trump, who has essentially clinched the nomination, was vastly out-fundraised and outspent by his Republican rivals and still managed to bulldoze them. So the criticisms of big money and Citizens United become more and more difficult in the age of the internet and decentralized media.

Speaking of campaign finance, Marilyn W. Thompson has a new piece for us on the Presidential Election Campaign Fund:

[It’s] used to give political unknowns a fighting shot. Now $300 million sits in the fund—and no one wants anything to do with it. Can campaign spending be fixed?

Before addressing that question, here are some more thoughts about the homestretch of the Democratic race, from reader Kathleen:

First of all, I am not a Democrat, or a Republican. I like to think I’m an independent and think for myself. Regarding the Democratic race, I think Bernie Sanders has done quite a bit for young people and the disenfranchised who usually do not get involved in political campaigns. His followers are probably not mainly Democrats. His ideas are socialist.

I feel he has used the Democratic Party. But he probably feels the Democratic Party has used him. He probably promised NOT to be a third-party candidate (much like Trump did with the Republicans).

I just think Bernie needs to give in. Even though he’s older and a good guy, Hillary has done her due diligence. Even if you don’t like her and think she is funded by the wrong people, she did go through one unsuccessful campaign in 2008 and handled it well. I was for her then and found her graceful exit and support of Barack Obama inspirational.

Obama was an anomaly. But, then again, the Democratic Party decided the people had spoken. Obama was also black, and how could they fight that and show diversity in their party? I have to tell you Obama inspired me. He was certainly riding the wave.

I just wonder if the Democrats or Hillary have anything in store for Bernie. I don't see him being vice president, even though I have thought about it and don’t think it would be a bad idea (although his followers would hate it and so would he). There is no such thing as a Socialist in Chief. But maybe there can be someplace found for him in government.

But, as the article related (paraphrasing Al Gore), this Democratic race is about the country. The country comes first.

A reader suggests that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is causing most of the turmoil within the Democratic Party right now:

Molly Ball writes, “Many Sanders supporters told me they had once liked Clinton, but over the course of the primary they have come to dislike and distrust her.” This is exactly what is happening for many Bernie supporters, and much of the blame lies on the DNC. Whether you believe the game was “rigged,” you have to admit that having the former campaign chair of one of the candidates heading up the party as DNC chair during the primary creates the appearance of impropriety.

This created an environment where confirmation bias ruled and everything that could be considered tipping the scales for Hillary (limited debates, poorly scheduled debates, superdelegates flocking to a single candidate, DNC/Clinton campaign office sharing, coordinated fundraising etc.) hardened the opposition to Clinton. People who were once lukewarm toward Clinton now have an animus toward her that may not be remedied before the general.

And, of course, Clinton’s refusal to release her transcripts [of her Wall Street speeches] hasn’t helped. As much as Clinton supporters may not care about the transcripts, Bernie supporters see it as proof that she is corrupt. If there really is nothing damaging there, her refusal to release them seems baffling.

However, if Clinton loses the general, the DNC will be to blame.

But Clare, in a post earlier this week, wondered if Bernie’s campaign could be hurting its own cause by speaking out against Wasserman Schultz and backing her primary opponent in her home district (and building his own network of support within the party in general):

Politifact awarded a “false” rating to allegations that the Nevada convention had been tainted by misconduct. [CB note: Here’s a video of DWS responding to those charges on CNN]

And in the past week, the campaign appeared to undercut its own argument that it has not been treated fairly by the Democratic establishment. In December, Weaver told supporters the DNC had put “its thumb on the scales in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” But during the CNN interview in which he accused Wasserman Schultz of “throwing shade,” Weaver suggested the problem was personal, not institutional. “It’s not the DNC. By and large, people in the DNC have been very good to us. Debbie Wasserman Schultz really is the exception,” Weaver said. If the campaign sends mixed messages as it engages in the feud, that could divert the attention of supporters away from its big-picture ambition.

Do you think Wasserman Schultz should step down as DNC chair? Or is Bernie’s campaign more to blame for the discord in the party right now? Share your thoughts via hello@. Update from a reader, Stephen Sheehy:

Wasserman Schultz certainly deserves criticism for the mess that her party finds itself in. The Dems have been crushed in Senate and House races and even more so at the state level. How about bringing back Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy?

Whatever one thinks of Clinton or Sanders (for whom I caucused, admittedly), it would be hard to find two less electable people in the party. Everyone hates Clinton and Sanders is a socialist! The only reason I have any hope is that Trump is perhaps even more unappealing. A smart DNC head would have told both Sanders and Clinton to forget about it and supported alternatives. Any generic liberal (like O’Malley) would win in a walk.

Here’s another reader, Jill, and I think a lot of her analysis could be applied to Trump and the effect he’s having on the Republican Party:

Sanders is currently sowing deep distrust of the Democratic Party. With each primary loss, he blames the system as undermining him or being unfair, planting the idea that Clinton is not the legitimate winner of the Democratic nomination. What worries me is that by attacking the structure of the primary process he is not just weakening Clinton's eventual candidacy but the party itself. He has pulled in voters who are distrustful of the system and showed them that their biases against the system are correct.

But then Sanders isn’t really a Democrat and he’s not thinking—or caring—about what’s best for the Democrats as a whole. He’s not going to pull a Howard Dean, who became chairman of the party after his primary loss, and he couldn’t accept such a position without charges of selling out by his most ardent supporters.

As for someone pulling an Al Gore and getting Sanders to concede the race, I don’t believe that is possible. It would be seen as a betrayal by many of his young fans who would rather the deep and corrupt party system be utterly obliterated than to ensure a continuation of liberal and progressive policies, but less progressive than they’d like, for at least the next four years. Sander would not only have to tone down his rhetoric but admit that some of his attacks on Clinton were wrong.

In the end the divide is between a group of people who want to see the Democratic party thrive and continue pushing policies that helps Americans, and a group of people that feels that the two-party system is what is hurting America. And I don’t know how you reconcile those two world views.

Hillary is the stodgy, old politician while Bernie is fun, exciting, and new. Yeah, Bernie has been around politics forever, but no one outside Vermont other than political junkies knew who he was until about six months ago. Bernie’s appeal with college kids is especially unsurprising, since he basically carries himself like a lovable old college professor.

And why doesn’t the self-described socialist alienate many Democrats with that label? “I think young people haven’t generated enough assets and are far enough away from natural death to not be scared by social democracy,” says one reader. Not to mention that Millennials have no living memory of Cold War communism. And the Republicans have overused “socialist” over the past seven years to describe the the country’s center-left, pragmatic president and other mainstream Democrats, so perhaps the term is becoming normalized—a crying wolf, of sorts. Here’s another reader:

Why is the age gap is so stark? I’ll give you a hint: it is not because we think Bernie Sanders is totally radical, dude. It’s simple: The Internet.

Like TV was to radio in the famous Kennedy Nixon debate, so is the Internet to traditional media sources. Younger voters do not get their media through TV talking heads or dying newspapers, but even when they do, it is filtered through the Internet, where fact-checking and comments are easily and quickly accessible. We have grown up used to taking what we see with a grain of salt and then checking on Snopes to see if it’s legit.

Traditional or old media has been perpetuating the concept of Clinton as the best candidate or the inevitable candidate. Anyone with an Internet connection can see that in comment sections, Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly more popular. They can go to opensecrets.org and see exactly where the money funding these campaigns is coming from. They can quickly access years of voting records with a click. With these resources at our fingertips, the difference between the candidates becomes as plain as day.

Bernie Sanders is funded by over 3.25 million contributions averaging $27 and has no SuperPac. Sanders has held similar positions his entire career. He has never been beholden to special interests and he never will be. He is a public servant in the truest sense of the word.

Hillary Clinton gets most of her donations from people maxing out at $2700 and holds lavish campaign fundraisers entertaining the wealthy elite. Her SuperPac has been chugging along for quite some time, gathering vast sums of dark money from we-will-never-knows. Her positions have changed time and again depending on which constituency she is speaking to or what the political mood is at the time. We have no reason to believe she has our interests at heart.

Now, if you were simply reading print editions the NYTimes or watching CNN, these facts may never have been presented to you. For added irony, the older generation that sleep-walked us into the current disaster we call our representative government (aka the status quo) are the ones who are desperately defending it. They are now what we should refer to as low-information voters.

Another reader looks to ancient philosophy for insight:

By chance, I was reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric earlier today. He argues that young people are credulous because they have not yet been deceived many times; they are optimistic because they have not yet met with much failure; they are free from malice because they have not yet observed much wickedness. Hence, he argues, an orator addressing an audience consisting of young people must adapt to this collective character.

If the audience is composed of old people, on the other hand, the speaker is advised to adapt to a different set of characteristics that—as Aristotle suggests—consists “for the most part of elements that are the contrary of these [i.e. the characteristics of young people]”: old people are cynical because they have been deceived many times; they are pessimistic because they have met much failure; they are full of malice because they have experienced much evil, and so forth.

Far as I can see, there’s a problem with his advice. Even if we assume, for the sake of the argument, that these collective character sketches are accurate, Aristotle’s advice is only helpful if the audience consists of either old people or young people. Yet what is the speaker supposed to do if the audience consists of both young and old people? On Aristotle’s own account, after all, the character of the one group is “the contrary” of the character of the other. How then is the speaker supposed to adapt to contradictory characters without constantly contradicting herself?

He doesn’t offer any answer. I don’t really have one either.

If you do, or want to sound off on Hillary vs. Bernie in general, drop us an email. Update from a few readers, starting with Jonathon Booth:

A shocking large proportion of articles analyzing why young voters support Bernie in such large numbers ignore the most obvious reason why they would do so: They agree with his policies.

I guess the idea of voting for a politician whose policy positions you agree with doesn't fit well into the stereotype of shallow Millennials, but it seems to be the case. Clearly lots of young Americans are left-leaning and support (some version of) social democracy. Given the insanity of the Republican party and the structural changes in our economy over the past 40 years, this should surprise no one—unless, of course, you’re convinced that young people care only about popularity and snap-chatting.

Another gets more specific with the policy question:

It’s healthcare. I pay $1500 out of pocket for work-provided insurance that comes with a $2500 deductible that includes prescriptions and no copays. Young people are being shafted for insurance they can never afford to use in order to benefit an older class who’s entire motto is “I got mine, deal with it.”

I’m not a Sanders fan—I’m mourning Rand Paul right now—but I can see why he has the appeal. Young people want new solutions because what we have now is bullshit. Hillary parrots the same spiel as Obama and it hasn’t been a great eight years for young people.

In the wake of the Iowa caucuses, Ron Brownstein spotlights “the single most important dividing line in the struggle between Sanders and Clinton”—age:

He crushed Clinton by an almost unimaginable 6-1 (84 percent to 14 percent) among voters younger than 30. For those tempted to dismiss that as just a campus craze, he also routed her by 58 percent to 37 percent among those aged 30-44. But Clinton’s margins were almost as impressive among older voters: she beat Sanders 58 percent to 35 percent among those aged 45-64, and by 69 percent to 26 percent among seniors.

A reader remarks on those “astonishing” numbers:

Now I know for the first time how much trouble Hillary is going to be in come November. The Democrat Party needs young people to turn out in big numbers, and young people apparently can’t stand her. I guess Lena Dunham’s pleas fell on deaf ears?

But seriously though, this might be the biggest news from last night. Look for Hillary to double her youth outreach efforts. Look for lots of lame comedy videos and young celeb endorsements.

This reader isn’t as worried for Clinton: “Hillary has the edge: Young people don’t turn out to vote.” Another reader wonders why Sanders—age 74, six years older than Clinton—is killing it with the kids:

Young people have always wanted to upset the old order and change things. My generation fell in love with Gene McCarthy in the ‘60s. Like Sanders, McCarthy was able to portray himself as an outsider who was going to deliver us from the dark and save us from the madness.

Sanders is hitting all the right revolutionary rhetorical notes, but eventually his people will realize that his promises are just too good to be true.

Another skilled writer from our inbox is deeply skeptical of a Sanders presidency:

One thing I still have trouble understanding is how Bernie believes he can be an effective commander in chief. President Obama, whom I think of as a moderate/pragmatic Democrat, came into office riding a wave of popular support and a mandate for change following eight years of Bush and a financial crisis. He also had overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate.

Bernie is admittedly further left than Obama and is sure to face at least one Republican-controlled chamber, if not two. When asked how he will manage to get his agenda through the legislature, his response is always some variation of, “The political revolution we’re trying to start will put so much outside pressure on members of Congress that they’ll be forced to work with me.”

First, this assumes that Bernie will be able to sustain any popular support he will have coming into office. I find it hard to believe that Bernie’s support is anywhere near the overwhelming levels President Obama had in 2008. Moreover, as we saw with Obama, that consistent support fell off before he had much time to start rolling out his agenda (see: 2009 town halls with an abundance of Tea Partiers and a noticeable absence of the Obama coalition).

Second, Bernie also assumes elected officials who may not share his views will be swayed by these supposed outside demands. That is either disingenuous or incredibly naive. Politics aside, Bernie himself acknowledges how much of Congress is beholden to special interests; does he think he can convince members to suddenly accede to public opinion over the interests of their donors? Did he see what happened to the background-check legislation that had 90 percent support from the public?

Lastly, Bernie and Obama share one trait that I think has made it difficult for Obama to work with Congress and is a likely harbinger of a Sanders presidency: Neither wants to do the relationship-building (i.e. schmoozing) required of a president to build trust with legislators. As LBJ, Reagan, and the first Clinton have shown, knowing how to work within the system is paramount to accomplishing one’s agenda.

Some may counter that it was impossible for Obama to work with a Republican Party that had no interest in coming to the table. But this problem wasn’t just between Obama and Republicans; it extended to Democrats, too. Obama barely managed to get his TPP proposal through, and his initial last-minute appeals to Democrats failed. I don’t see how Bernie operates any differently.

Ultimately, the realities of the presidency will have one of two consequences for Bernie: either he will remain steadfast in his principles and be incapable of accomplishing anything, or he will be forced to work within the system. Both will leave his supporters disappointed and wondering whether he is just “more of the same.”

But this Bernie supporter provides an impassioned plea:

I’ve been exposed to Sanders from his appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher for about 6 or 7 years now, and he has always been a no-bullshit debater, extremely passionate about his views. I remember an episode that aired 11/07/2014, and during the Overtime segment, they were mulling over him running for president and the audience in unison just yelled, “Run Bernie!” Since that day I have been supporting him for president, originally hoping that Warren and him would make the best ticket I could hope for.

It wasn’t until his rally that he held in LA back in August that I realized that something special was going on with him. I had given up on American politics in general. An uninformed people combined with paid-for politicians had put my mind into a state of civil war, where one side of me wanted to leave the country and move to a place that better represented my views, and the other side of me understood and respected what our founding fathers had done, and what the people who came before us had done, to make this country the greatest ever and I have great pride in America.

My views were shattered during that rally; seeing 27,000 people show up was jaw dropping. I had thought Americans were dumb and didn’t care, but that rally corrected that belief. It was also the first time I had heard a candidate say something I had been saying for years which was, “Why should people be given criminal records for marijuana possession, yet not one person responsible for the financial collapse of 2008 being charged for their crimes.”

When I was 17 years old I was arrested and charged with one felony for sales and one felony for intent to sell, because I had two grams of pot on me. After being threatened with mandatory minimums, I pleaded guilty and accepted a plea-bargain, despite the fact those chargers were bullshit.

The event ruined my life. I lost my eligibility for a scholarship program, my drivers license was suspended for years, and my relationship with my family was destroyed, which lead to severe depression. That depression turned to anger after the 2008 financial collapse, especially after watching a few of PBS Frontline investigations that covered the subject. It was absolute bullshit that I was a criminal in society’s eyes, yet these bankers were not.

Bernie was the first politician I have seen who agreed with that premise—not just agreed with it, but stated it loud and clear for everyone to hear. I remember hearing him say that and just tearing up because I could not believe that someone finally made that connection.

I am constantly ridiculed by conservatives and called naive by Clinton supporters, but to me it is worth it. I truly love this country.

Anyway, I hope that gives you some insight as to why I feel as strongly about this election as I do. I’m glad you give readers a platform from which to express their opinions, and you seem to be doing the best you can to do so without bias. Thank you!

As a student at the University of Chicago, Sanders was active in both the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1962, he was arrested for protesting segregation in public schools in Chicago; the police came to call him an outside agitator, as he went around putting up flyers around the city detailing police brutality.

Another tweet floating around goes further than the one above, claiming that “if elected, Goldwater promised to overturn the Civil Rights Act and re-segregate the nation.” That’s not true; he backed the 1964 GOP platform that endorsed “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Goldwater did vote against the 1964 bill, but from the standpoint of a constitutionalist, not segregationist. In fact, Goldwater was very much committed to civil rights at the state and local level. For instance, he was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP and helped integrate the Phoenix public schools. Lee Edwards, in his biography of Goldwater, further details his complex political persona:

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.